Hobo Johnson and The Lovemakers
Thirty seconds into my first Hobo Johnson and The Lovemakers YouTube video, I was wondering what the fuck I was watching. By the end, I was absolutely captivated by their personality, their style, and their music. Last Thursday, I got the chance to see them live.
The group went viral after Bob Boilen, the director of NPR Tiny Desk Concerts, invited them to be guests on this popular Youtube series. Hobo Johnson (a pen name for California native Frank Lopes, Jr.) has made a name for himself rapping, singing, and occasionally screaming sad lyrics with a smile on his face. With erratic cadences the lynchpin of his musical style, Frank has come a long way since his dad kicked him out of the house as a teenager. His album, The Rise of Hobo Johnson, recounts his struggles with loneliness and self-worth; the “Bring Your Mom Tour” which brought Frank to Toad’s is a celebratory marker of his rise, both in distance from his teenage struggles and in music notoriety.
Seeing Frank perform is essential to understanding the energy and purpose of his music. On Thursday night, he ran onto the stage with his chino pants pulled up to his knees, exposing his bare feet; he wore a big black hoodie and, each time he put the hood up, he made sure one ear was sticking out. His music videos and live performances are different than his tracks available on Spotify. On Spotify, he can sound sad and erratic, but in person (and on Youtube), the band’s energy is different. Frank fills his performances with entertaining throwaway lines and stories, which make for exceptionally personal performances. His energy and cheerful style are unequivocally endearing.
Frank’s boyish humor and eccentric personality make him a captivating character on stage. He joked around throughout the show. At one point, a fan offered him a joint and Frank responded, “Not now…very busy.” Laughter spread across the crowd in a way I have never seen before at a concert. In another funny moment, a Yalie yelled, “Fuck Harvard!” and Frank responded with something along the lines of, “Dude, why? That’s a really good school and I’m sure a lot of people do great things coming out of there.” After a few emotionally involved songs, Frank took a break to give an absurdly detailed, fictional account of the beginnings of religion and government on Earth. He imagined a world confronted with an annoyingly crafty cockroach. The people became united first behind religion and, when that wasn’t enough, government, in a collective effort to systemize their murderous intentions. The story ends with the collective realization that a shoe may have done the job just fine.
The raw emotion Frank injected into his biggest hit, “Peach Scone,” transformed the crowd. They screamed along to the lyrics that describe Frank struggling to express his love for a girl who, in Frank’s words, “cared about me a lot when no one else cared about me.” In the song, Frank takes the girl on a coffee date intending to confess his love for her but, when nerves kick in, he instead confesses his love for peach scones. He playfully toys with the anger and well-wishes that accompany unreciprocated love. In “Creve Coeur” (French for “heartbreak”), Frank shares with his listeners his concern that he may be just another “shitty guy.” He is mortified by the idea that people lose the capacity for love because they grow up witnessing seemingly idyllic but truly destructive marriages. Frank is not the petty, self-pitying whiner that some Internet critics make him out to be. Rather, he is reflective, and his lyrics describing the struggles and uncertainties associated with relationships resonate differently with different people.
Frank Lopes is deeply thoughtful, taking on serious topics in creative ways. His message is not designed to invoke pity or sadness though he is not afraid of public emotional vulnerability. His songs cover sad topics, but his style celebrates his individual quirks. With his songs and personality as guidance, seemingly insurmountable sadness can seem transient. His lyrics are largely focused on relationship struggles but his style is representative of his resilient individuality. In “The Ending,” he sings, “The way I listen to music is … / Fucking, like, medicine, dude / It makes me feel better about my life, and, uh… / My dream is to do that for other people.” Hobo Johnson is a self-aware artist; he sings from the perspective of someone who has, in some ways, made it through a dark time in his life but still openly struggles with his self-image, self-worth, and seemingly endless loneliness. These challenges are hellish, but his individuality is unsuppressable and his style the better for it.
